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| 2018 community dinner on Thanksgiving day in Clinton Co., Michigan |
The concept of "all together" instead of "can't afford the full production of a traditional Thanksgiving feast" was one obstacle that the steering committee persistently worked on. In their news releases and advertising, word of mouth, and the interactions with donors and diners and volunteers the message was stubbornly expressed: this is not a free lunch for poor people, but rather a shared space for all to mingle and embrace the abundance connected with the feeling of thanksgiving.
There were so many operational details to manage in order to prepare the people, the foods, the venue, and the volunteers and diners. Then all leftovers were expertly packed into sets of 4-person meals to be frozen at the local food pantry and given out in the following weeks. Beyond these descriptive details and the history of the undertaking, though, perhaps most interesting of all is the "why" question. There is the nutritional and social satisfaction of the event for all parties engaged, but there are probably deeper reasons to take on the work of staging the public occasion that come from this moment in history here and in so many other urban centers around the state and the union.
Until ten years ago the trends of increasingly isolated, privatized lives were separating people from each other more and more until people, even ones in the same household or family, were living parallel lives and only intersecting briefly at times of crisis or comfort. Around this same time in the early 2000s the power of the Internet reached a point that mobile devices as possessions, personal accessories, status symbols, and functional communication and recording machines made it possible and practical to fulfill the Internet Religious Principle that "information wants to be free" (not owned, controlled, produced by credentialed experts or specialists). Sadly, the related Principle that Google promotes in its company, "Do No Evil," has been less widely embraced. One of the results of making it easy to find information, easy to add your own information, and easy to create fraud is that the price of expertise sometimes dissolves with the touch of a search button. People self-diagnose health complications, sometimes with success and many other times with failure.
There is a belief that information carefully won and organized can be made flat; that hierarchies can be dispensed with; that with enough bandwidth and processor power the entire known haystack can be searched to find the proverbial needle. While that is magical when it works and the electrical supply is uninterrupted, there is a side-effect of eliminating the structures, sequences, priorities, and principles that ruled expertise pre-Internet. By obliterating distinctions and treating all information and the data it rests upon as equal in value, a false sense of confidence (hubris, perhaps) is spreading, and a feeling that nothing matters; everything is the same importance. A society without boundaries may be liberating, but it also is uprooting. Even facts can be dispensed with since every standpoint is relativistic. Anything that is good and lasting in value can freely float to the surface; but so can wretchedness.
So as the already self-reliant, independent, self-referential lives have spread, this Internet capacity for removing boundaries and hierarchies has amplified the unrooted feelings among increasingly contingent, economically unstable livelihoods of so many people in rural and urban USA. In reaction to this observation or vaguely anxious feeling a few organizers and many donors have responded year by year, offering a chance to begin relationships with others in the community known by face but not by voice or name.
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